EVS at the heart of Harlequin 1

Sky Sports has selected EVS instant tapeless technology for its new Harlequin 1 HD production facilities to power its live and near-live HD studios, as well as its interactive and highlights production suites.

Sky Sports has selected EVS instant tapeless technology for its new Harlequin 1 HD production facilities to power its live and near-live HD studios, as well as its interactive and highlights production suites.

The project covers all ingest, production and play out workflows, including highlights editing and online storage infrastructures. In total four production studios at Harlequin 1 will be using four HD XT[2]+ video broadcast servers, the latest from the XT series, and four HD XS studio servers, all controllable by eight IPDirector suites, including IPEdit modules, for content management, browsing, clip creation and fast turnaround editing.

EVS will also equip the entire Edit Control Room (ECR) at Sky Sports for new media production and delivery. The ECR workflow will rely on ten XS servers operated for ingest and playout, and controlled by the IPDirector content management system. Recorded media, clips and edits will be shared in a central near-line storage system, the EVS XStoreSAN, which provides 20TB storage capacity, including proxy media. A total of eighteen EVS Xedio CleanEdit stations will be used for the creation of highlights packages (including graphics) with direct access to the central storage platform. Once finalised, EDL’s from the Xedio CleanEdit editors will be sent to the XS servers for HD conforming and direct play out.

EVS tapeless systems will also be implemented for Sky Sports’ SportaCabin, a production area dedicated to live and near-live highlights editing for the Premiership and UEFA Champions League. The production will be supported by eight XS servers, eleven HD Xedio CleanEdit editing workstations and eleven IPEdit on-the-fly editors for halftime and post-match analyses.

Darren Long, Director of Operations at Sky Sports, said: “The real benefit of having a new HD tapeless infrastructure covering ingest, edit and playout is that you can maximise the use of content throughout different platforms very quickly and efficiently. EVS, with its expertise in live productions and sport broadcasting, has demonstrated the value of its tapeless technology and proven on more than one occasion that it can meet the challenges of such an important project”.

This new EVS workflow has been developed to offer optimized integration with third-party tools, such as NRCS, MAM, archiving, automation and graphics. The new system provides full communication between EVS content production tools and Avid’s iNEWS newsroom system, allowing play out from the XS server to be automated from the iNEWS rundown interface. Thanks to the full transparency between the systems, completed Edits and media can be easily transferred from the MAM to the XS servers for playout with EVS’ MPlay remote controllers.